‘This is insane!’ You almost yelp at the blast that just narrowly missed your ship as you maneuver it through the icy labyrinth of tunnels beneath Nivlahim’s surface. The automated defenses for the tunnels have not been deactivated by the flight control station and are now vehemently firing at you, an assumed enemy. When another blast sends a shock wave through the ship after missing by only a hair’s breadth, you shout pointless at the turrets, “I live here!” Needless to say, they ignore your exclamation.

‘Just focus on not getting hit, Keri,’ Shilo’s calm voice resonates through your mind. In response, your face contorts further into frustration. You bite your tongue on the response you could so easily release on her. ‘We don’t want to blow up before we get off this giant ice cube.’

That was it. You can’t take it anymore. ‘Oh, this from the woman who actually got hit and crashed!’ You tear at the controls once more, pulling the Valkyr into a 28-by-15-point turn, spinning round a bend in the tunnel with a heaving groan as the monstrous drives roar to maintain speed. You know that comment isn’t fair. Shilo had been facing not only the automatic but the manned batteries as well, which nearly tripled the defenses and would have made passage through these tunnels all but impossible. Still, you feel better now that you’ve released some of that frustration. You’re almost there, anyway.

‘Overhead,’ Shilo’s voice calls out, and your vision is directed to a small opening that you would have missed otherwise. You press into the controls and send the Valkyr into a forward flip, shooting the ship straight up the small opening in the ceiling of ice before the flip is finished. You’re glad you didn’t miss it, as a shot can be seen passing straight through the point through which you were about to fly before your ship disappears into the tiny tunnel.

At this point, your main goal is to keep the ship from colliding with the sides of the tunnel, which, if anything, seems to be getting narrower. The edges also appear to be increasingly jagged as you pass up through what you realize may simply be a ventilation tunnel ending in rather solid grating. ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous,’ Shilo says. ‘Only an idiot would design something like that the size of a ship. Plus, need I remind you, the atmosphere is toxic on Nivlahim. No one wants to ventilate anything to the atmosphere.’

You can’t help wondering, then, exactly what this overly convenient tunnel is doing here until Shilo interjects again. ‘Look at the walls.’ You do so, and Shilo’s observance once again seems to focus your eyes on what she intends  for you to see. There are claw marks all across the tunnel. Ice wyrms definitely explain the size of the tunnel. While the females are the hunters and fighters, male ice wyrms are the builders and considerably larger than their female counterparts. Some male wyrms can grow to sizes two to three times as big as a Valkyr. That also explains the changing size of the tunnel. As the wyrm dug upward, it lost weight, wanting to finish its tunnel to the snow before breeding season.

You find the ice wyrm’s breeding habits quite extraordinary. Ice wyrms have the unique ability to extract their oxygen from the snow and ice they eat, though in small enough quantities that when on the surface of Nivlahim, they can hardly maintain their hunting habits. Only breeding and hibernation occur on the surface. After ice wyrms breed, they hibernate for almost an entire cycle before the female awakes her mate, and both return to the sea below the ice together before the female gives birth in the water, leaving the male to feed it while she goes to hunt. Both genders of the ice wyrms produce milk for feeding, and while the female is off hunting, the male takes the child to the wyrm caverns, where all ice wyrm children and females live out most of their time while the male adults return to digging after having replenished their strength. It seems strange to you, but nature is a very odd thing.

Sure enough, as the tunnel approaches its narrowest point, a mass of snow can be seen covering the hole at the end of the tunnel. Shilo reminds you quickly to activate the plasma shielding to melt the snow before traveling through it, and you do so just in time. A small patch of snow makes it past the plasma field’s range before it’s raised, causing it to thud softly on the hull of the ship before being melted away. The rest of the snow is turned to steam before it reaches the field and is pushed gently out of the way. Then, for the first time in over four cycles, for the first time since you moved here, and for the first time since your mommy died, you see it. There is a single, solitary source of light in the sky, yet it fills the sky’s vastness with its bright luminance as if there is a hole gently poked in the darkness. Of course, the Bifrost is on the other side of the planet and currently unseen, but you remember it looking more like a tissue that had a rainbow sneezed onto it, simultaneously beautiful and yet somehow disgusting and disturbing. Linthia, however, is like perfection in your eyes, its gentle pinprick of light passing through millions of rosts of void just to reach your eyes. At this distance, it isn’t even harmful to stare at it, and you feel as though you could do just that for days, but you have other business to tend to, and the green star which can look so much like a Valkyrie’s eye during an eclipse isn’t going anywhere.

You press into the controls once more, pulling the Valkyr into a fully vertical ascent and increasing the throttle to full atmo. It is, of course, possible for the ship to fly much faster than this, but the forces would cause undue strain on the air around the ship and cause such events as compression-induced flames and heat lightning, which would not only play hell with the sensors but also draw unnecessary attention to your ship. Full atmo permits speeds well above the necessary for exiting the planetary gravitational field while avoiding such atmospheric anomalies as these. Even at what the ship considers very low speeds, however, you certainly feel the movement of the ship. Your eyes are pressing into the backs of their sockets, leaving your vision extremely narrow as you accelerate to exit velocity. As you pass through the first sets of clouds, even through the dark edges of your vision, you see them.

Large, crudely shaped behemoths barely fit for flying plow through the air like falling boulders. As the compression heat reduces, the ships open their hangar doors, which begin to spew forth small landing shuttles full of Armadian troops. A planet like Nivlahim is, of course, too dangerous to trust with Peacekeeper forces. This is full martial law going into effect, and it’s only after a full surrender will have been issued by the Nivlahimi government. ‘Of course,’ you think to Shilo, ‘the government here is only a shadow government already. Daddy said on the wireless a few weeks ago that the Ginnung Headquarters had been successfully transferred to its new home off of Nivlahim.’

‘What?!’ Shilo’s surprise makes it clear that she didn’t know anything about that before now. ‘Then where are the Ginnung headquartered? We’ve occupied every Ginnung-controlled planet!’ There are a few millidays of mental silence as you rise up through the last of the clouds, the pervading dark of space truly visible now, Linthia a solitary light in the black of the void. You can see the rest of the invading fleet now, its ships issuing forth from heavy carriers and forward operation mobility docks. ‘Then this entire operation was meaningless.’ Shilo’s voice seems distant, sorrowful. So many lives had been lost for no reason, as she saw it.

You can’t respond to her like this. You set the necessary course into the navigation interface and move back down into the cargo hold, where you enter a stasis po
d before your bones start to deteriorate. You haven’t received the proper treatment for extended space travel, and the distance from Nivlahim to Thor isn’t short. Zero gravity for so much time can take a serious toll on an untreated body. As you activate the pod, you utter an audible, “Goodnight, Shilo,” to the hold full of dead bodies and broken parts, your eyes resting on your dipulse as you enter full stasis.